Dreamhost Hosting Reviews

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Key features

Great reasons to choose Dreamhost

Want2Host users rate Dreamhost as 3.7 out of 5 – Very Good.

Based in Brea, California, west of Los Angeles, DreamHost launched in 1997, so it has a long and proven track record. It’s owned by New Dream Network LLC, a company formed by four college students in 1996. All four co-founders are still working for the company, and Simon Anderson - an experienced entrepreneur and executive - is now CEO. Despite restructuring, the company still employ a friendly and personal tone on their website and marketing material.

DreamHost offer a very generous affiliate programme which offers cash rewards for referrals, plus a free domain name with each new account. They also have an impressive two week free trial and a 97-day money-back guarantee promise. The environmentally-conscious will also be interested to note that DreamHost is entirely carbon neutral despite hosting more than one million domains.

Dreamhost Plans

1. Shared Hosting

Plans & Service

Pricing

3-Year

(billed triennially)

$7.95/mo

1-year

(billed annually)

$9.95/mo

Month-to-Month

(billed monthly)

$10.95/mo

Add-On Services

Pricing

SSL/TLS Certificates with Let's Encrypt

(activate in your control panel)

FREE

Unique IP Address

(purchase from your control panel)

$5.95/mo

Setup Fees

FREE

New Domain Name

(.com, .net, .org, .info, or .xyz)

FREE

(first year only)

Domain Privacy Protection

$10.95/mo

2. VPS Hosting

$120/mo

MAX IT OUT

$60/mo

GO Bigger

$30/mo

MOST POPULAR

$15/mo

START HERE

8GB RAM

4GB RAM

2GB RAM

1GB RAM

240GB SSD StorageUnlimited BandwidthUnlimited Domains

120GB SSD StorageUnlimited BandwidthUnlimited Domains

60GB SSD StorageUnlimited BandwidthUnlimited Domains

30GB SSD StorageUnlimited BandwidthUnlimited Domains

3. Dedicated Hosting

Server Hosting

Storage

Storage

Storage

4 Cores

4GB RAM

8GB RAM

16GB RAM

Price per Month

$149

$189

$229

12 Cores

16GB RAM

32GB RAM

64GB RAM

Price per Month

$279

$329

$379

Because the company has such a variety of hosting options, there are quite a number of different DreamHost hosting plans. Starting at as low as $8.95 a month for basic shared hosting and running as high as $379 a month for some of the dedicated server options, there is a hosting plan for every budget.

Having been around since 1996, the company has evolved along with hosting industry technologies and is constantly adding new aspects to some of its fundamental features. Your free DreamHost domain allows you to host and manage unlimited subdomains. You can create multiple, deep sites at no extra cost. Because Solid State Drives (SSD) are used by DreamHost, backup, caching, and database queries perform much faster. The company has its own control panel which supports the file manager, MySQL database, and third-party CMS software. One of my favorite features, though, is the DreamHost Status page. Hosted outside of the company’s main network (in case of major downtime), this page is dedicated to information about service issues, changes, and updates.

Dreamhost Ease of Use

For such a complex menu board, DreamHost is a rather easy-to-use hosting provider. The one universal throughout the company’s hosting plans is the control panel. Whether you are building a new site from scratch or are going to transfer a domain over to DreamHost, the intuitive control panel allows you to easily compete every task. Most of my experience is with the cPanel and a little bit of Plesk. Even though this was my first time using the DreamHost Web controls, they contained the same fundamental elements. I didn’t feel like I was switching from riding a bike to flying a helicopter. It was more like switching from one car manufacturer to another. The knobs and buttons may be in different places; but, they still do the same things.

Dreamhost Top 3 Pros and Cons

In general, I like what DreamHost does. It embraces open-source computing and offers a much wider variety of plans and services than its competition does. However, that dynamic spirit sometimes gets in its way. For example, just like my cell phone provider, the company changes its plans too frequently. Its most popular option, DreamHost Happy Hosting doesn’t even exist anymore. I can’t really knock a tech company for constant change, though.

It does many things extremely well. The company produced a series of DreamHost tutorial videos that explain many of the tech-heavy subjects to the less savvy users. The fact that it offers so many different hosting platforms is a testament to its abilities and versatility. Finally, even though it takes it fair share of abuse, DreamHost tech support has some cool features (like DreamHost Status) that other hosting companies simply do not offer.

Here are some areas where DreamHost does an amazing job and other areas where the company falls a little short.

DreamHost Pros:

Choices: There is a hosting option for nearly every online project

Open-Source: Dynamic software platforms help you stay current

Experience: A wealth of expert industry experience to rely on

DreamHost Cons:

Customer Support: DreamHost live chat can be very unresponsive

No Site Builder: You have to put some work in to create your Web page

Control Panel: cPanel devotees will have some hiccups

Customer Reviews

1 comment:

I would recommend dreamhost to commercial customers who want reliability efficiency and easy management of their domain / website. I have been dealing with other host in the past and they could not offer the bandwidth dreamhost is givving me. Also, dreamhost is really affordable and is my choice for our community fire department website.

Only time I needed their support is setting up my domain and website and they fulfilled my expectation with their great support.